


Fifty Things To Do When You Wake Up

by Illiad_And_Oddity



Category: The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-02-22
Updated: 2013-02-24
Packaged: 2017-12-03 05:19:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 910
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/694597
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Illiad_And_Oddity/pseuds/Illiad_And_Oddity
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>70 years is a long time to be away from home.  Steve takes a roadtrip to reconnect with America as he once knew it, and as it is now.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Indiana

**Author's Note:**

> Fifty vignettes, one for each state. I'll be posting them in no particular order, hopefully one a day until I'm done.

In Indiana, Steve got horribly lost.

On a dirt road, surrounded by fields laying fallow for winter, he began to reconsider the wisdom of letting Tony put a GPS on his motorcycle. He'd said no, quite adamantly in fact, because he liked his bike the way it was and enjoyed having something that was made with nothing but mechanical parts he could fix on his own if need be. He felt quite defensive of it.

After about an hour of driving around lost, he found a paved road, which led to a residential street, and decided to stop and ask for directions from a boy playing out front with a football.

The boy went inside to get his dad, and Steve spent the next little while listening to the man compliment his motorcycle.

"That's a gorgeous bike," the man said, "1940s?"

"No, but close. It's a 1938 Nimbus Type C," Steve corrected. Tony had bought it for him. For a guy who worked so hard at being seen as a devil-may-care jackass, Tony was incredibly generous to his friends.

"Holy shit," the man said, "Hey, there's a parade tomorrow in town, and the classic cars club is going to be in it. Classic motorcycles are welcome, too. You should join us!"

Steve was about to say no - he didn't really like parades, but reconsidered. He wasn't going to be being paraded around as Captain America, he was just going to be Steve, the guy with a really nice classic bike. Besides, the whole point of this trip was to actually experience America, which was why he was avoiding the highways. "Alright," he said, "Why not?"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, I have not been to all fifty states, and want to avoid stereotypes for them. If you have a suggestion about a minor, mundane adventure Steve could have in a particular state, I'd love to hear it!


	2. Minnesota

In Minnesota, Steve bought lunch for a homeless man in St. Paul.

That was something that hadn't changed in the last 70 years. There had always been homeless people. Steve felt nothing but sympathy for them. During the depression, he and his mother ended up living on the streets for slightly over a year before they found a room to rent in a boarding house, where he had met Bucky. He told Charlie, the homeless man, about it.

"Damn," Charlie said.

"What?" Steve asked.

"I guess you only talked to me because you were homeless once, too, then?" Charlie took a huge bite of his burger and swallowed it with hardly any chewing, "It's not that I'm not grateful, 'cause I am, but I guess that means I'm still invisible to most folks."

"I'd like to think I'd still help you even I hadn't been in the same boat once."

Charlie shrugged, "Maybe you would've. You seem like a good guy. But people like me – we just get ignored, mostly. It's like if they talk to someone down on their luck, they'll catch bad luck too. You know what that's like, don't you?"

Steve considered the way people's eyes had just slid past him and his mother when they were sleeping in an alley, carefully avoiding the sight of what they could be with just a little worse luck. He nodded sadly, "Yeah. I do."

Before he got back on the road, he wrote down a phone number and gave it to Charlie, "I'm pretty sure you'll be able to get a job with these people. Just tell her Steve gave you this number."

Pepper could help him find a job. Even if it was just as a janitor, it would be better than begging for spare change. He was pretty sure Stark Industries had a branch in Minneapolis.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 48 left...


	3. Michigan

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Almost forgot to post tonight! Made it before the day changed, though!

Michigan was known as the Land of Lakes, so Steve took a break from the oppressive August heat at one of the local swimming spots.

There were a ton of teenagers also there, and Steve had to work very hard to not look at some of the girls in their very small swimsuits, and remind himself that standards had changed a lot in the last seventy years. He was being old fashioned, he knew, but the clothing had been one of the hardest things to get used to about the modern era.

Unfortunately, one of the things that hadn't changed was that, wherever he went, he seemed to be the center of female attention and it didn't take long before he had attracted a young woman with a bright pink swimsuit, flirting at him.

"I'm Callie," she said brightly, "What's your name?"

"Steve."

Callie was nice enough, and at twenty-two, she was the close to the age he would be if not for the time he'd spent frozen in the ice, but something about her seemed impossibly young to him. He wouldn't have minded female companionship, or at least he didn't mind the idea of it, but this wasn't the right girl, especially not with painful memories of Peggy still so fresh. So instead he made polite conversation for about an hour, then got out of the water.

Behind him, he heard her mutter to her friend, "Never fails, I always go after the gay ones." 

He thought about correcting her, but then realized that there was absolutely no polite way to say 'I'm not gay, I'm just not interested in you.' He would probably never see this girl again, but he still didn't want to leave with her thinking he was a jerk. It was better to just pretend he hadn't heard the comment and not react.

“It was nice to meet you,” he called over his shoulder as he got back on his bike.


End file.
